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40th Anniversary: Spandau Ballet at The Scala - May 13th, 1980

Wed, May 13, 2020

40 years ago today, on a warm London May evening, at the Scala Cinema, which was then situated on the rather nondescript Tottenham Street, in the heart of what is now Fitzrovia, Spandau Ballet and its previously underground sub-sect of youth culture emerged blinking into the daylight.

Before the show, the crowd, previously not seen en-masse outside of a nightclub, spilled over the pavement clutching drinks from the nearby pub and eying each other up as they arrived each dressed in their own highly personalised version of the heightened street fashion/plundering of the history of style/Fritz Lang vision of the future that was going to be dubbed ‘’New Romantic” or “Blitz Kids”. All the stylistic cards were being thrown up in the air in a post-modern reset to prepare for a new decade. The event had been advertised by our version of social media, word of mouth, as were all our early shows.

It had the atmosphere of a bizarre red carpet event before a film premiere. There was a TV crew filming and interviewing the arrivals. There were photographers recording the scene. Spandau Ballet were to play live and the performance and the audience were being filmed by LWT for a Janet Street-Porter documentary for a TV broadcast as part of a series of films called 20th Century Box. The audience was joined by various journalists, photographers and media people, including Radio 1 DJ and TV presenter Peter Powell, numerous record company execs including impresario Bryan Morrison. It was a potent mix which we could have only dreamed of 6 months earlier before our Spandau Ballet rebirth and was entirely consistent with our title of “ The Next Big Thing” and the hottest unsigned band in the country and the new decade.

Since their first performance as Spandau Ballet at the Blitz 5 months earlier, the band’s career trajectory had been such that it seemed to have been fired out of some powerful pop culture cannon. A lot had happened! We had exploded from a standing start like Usain Bolt.

(Read: The Blitz - The First Spandau Ballet Performance here.)

At that first Blitz show, Chris Blackwell, legendary founder and owner of Island Records - the world’s coolest record company, had approached me offering to sign the band “on the spot”. It was a hugely seductive and exciting opportunity but there was a deal to be done. Accompanied by our newly appointed lawyer, Brian Carr, the band and I went to meet Chris at the Island HQ in London, a large relaxed converted villa on St. Peters Square in Hammersmith. Posters and gold and platinum discs of Bob Marley, Roxy Music, Stevie Winwood and Grace Jones greeted us. Chris showed us around. He was charming and smart. It all seemed so right. For a while. He introduced us to Nick Stewart, an A&R man who was to be our point person. He had the demeanour of an army officer. I think he was a friend of Chris’s from public school. He listened to our ideas about the band, it seemed very hard to explain the band’s ethos to him. Chris was not a UK resident at the time and had a limited time in the country each year. We would be dealing with Nick day-to-day. Not good. Then they showed us the terms of the deal they were proposing.

We retired for lunch at a local Chinese restaurant with Brian to consider it. I suppose it was an ‘OK’ deal for a new band, but both Brian and I thought we could do better. We went back to Island HQ after lunch and after a short discussion about the term, on a pre-arranged cue from Brian, we turned down the deal and ended the meeting abruptly and walked out. It was spectacular! Their jaws dropped. It showed huge confidence on our part. It was a bold effective tactic. It did mean however that we were very shortly in Hammersmith Broadway, on foot, without a record contract.

Although there was a vigorous discussion about the wisdom of this move with the band and myself later that evening, so powerful was our newly acquired self-confidence everyone soon settled down. Shortly afterward Chis left town for Paris or Jamaica and although we kept in contact and he maintained interest, we didn’t sign to them. We were soon to be distracted by other suitors and opportunities.

Meanwhile, our progress continued apace. Days after the visit to Island the band played their second show as Spandau Ballet at Mayhem Studios Battersea at a multi-media event party organised by a number of our friends and now collaborators from the ‘’Blitz”. It was in effect the first Warehouse Party Brand that would morph eventually into the ubiquitous rave format. There were arthouse and porn films projected onto the ceiling, DJs, alcohol, drugs, Spandau Ballet and hundreds and hundreds of people crammed into a relatively small space. The combined word of mouth powers of Chris Sullivan, Graham Ball, Robert Elms and Graham Smith reached every hip club person in London. Blitz Kids, Soul Boys and Rockabillies. All soon to merge together into “Club Culture”. It was rammed. Hundreds couldn’t get in. It was bloody chaos. The band performed and were well received, but most people that were there couldn’t see them, it was so crowded. But that wasn’t the point. The value to us was that we were for the second time in as many weeks performing at the epicentre of hipness in the new London. Even if you hadn’t seen the band or even couldn’t get in everyone knew that Spandau Ballet had played there. It was most certainly an event.

On New Year’s Eve as the 80s started, I remember feeling utterly satisfied with the band’s progress in the last month. We were right in the sweet spot of being the coolest band in the hippest scene in London. The decade seemed to be opening up before us. Great, but what next?

In January we played the Blitz again on one of Steve Strange and Rusty Egan’s Tuesday nights. It was a success, the band were getting more and more confident and it certainly cemented our position with that crowd, but afterwards, I knew we couldn’t play there anymore. We had huge momentum now and it what was important was that we kept it going. As special as the Blitz was, I did not want to end up with the band having a residency there, in a club. What was special could easily become predictable. The next show had to be another event. We had to keep up the momentum going at the same tempo.

I approached an old friend from school Steve Wooley, who was the manager and programmer of the Scala Cinema a very fashionable, tasteful repertory cinema known for its creative, exciting programming. He was on his own incredible upward trajectory which was to quickly make him one of the UK’s most successful, creative film producers (Absolute Beginners, Company of Wolves, Mona Lisa, Interview with a Vampire, The Crying Game). Would he be interested in promoting Spandau Ballet at the cinema with a complimentary programme of films in a late-night event? He had seen an earlier incarnation of Spandau Ballet and liked the band. He would. So on March 3rd, 1980, Spandau Ballet performed at the Scala, supported by Bunuel and Salvador Dali’s “Un Chien Andalou”. Our crowd followed and loved it.

At the same time, I realised I had to up the ante and momentum with the media coverage. We had articles about the band in the offing in cool publications like Camouflage and ID but we needed more than that. I decided to pitch to Fleet Street. Literally.

I was still studying for a degree in Politics and Economics at the University of London at the time. On a Monday afternoon, I had a 3-hour gap at the LSE (at The Aldwych) between a Comparative Social Structures lecture and an Introduction to Social Psychology class. I went around the corner into Fleet Street and cold-called the Evening News, The Evening Standard and the Daily Mirror from their lobbies. Journalists from each came down to talk to me. The Evening News passed, the Mirror ended up giving us a centre spread and David Johnson at the Standard half a page and became a huge supporter going forward.

We now had a youth cult following, national media coverage and even a good review in the NME from Robert Elms (now author and broadcaster on BBC Radio), our friend and part of the Blitz crew. He kept saying he wanted to write, so I suggested he write a review of the Scala Show and submit it for publication. I took him to their office to cold call them and submit it. It was published and was unsurprisingly a great review.

With all this heat going on London’s many other record companies started to take notice and call up. All we needed was a TV show…

One day the phone rang at my family home, a council flat in Holborn which doubled as my office. A man wanted to speak to the manager of Spandau Ballet. I confirmed it was me. He said he was from LWT and they had heard we were “the hottest most exciting unsigned band in the country”. I confirmed immodestly, that we were. He had come to the right place. He said, “We are London Weekend Television and we would like to make a documentary film about the band and the scene surrounding it and film your next performance”. Janet Street-Porter was producing the series.
Who could have wished for more?

I quickly arranged a second show at the Scala as its raised stage we would be a good place to film the band and Steve would understand what we needed to achieve.
On May 13th filming took place around London with interviews with the band and various characters from the ‘Blitz’ scene culminating in the event at the Scala.
Such was the abundance of talented people in the scene, our entire creative team came from our friends at the Blitz. Graham Smith was our graphic designer and photographer. Simon Withers our innovative lighting designer who also designed great clothes and Robert Elms was to introduce the band on stage with an extraordinary poem.

The band performed very well and looked incredible.

Everything had gone as well as it possibly could have done, the tv crew was happy with everything they had in the can and went off to edit it for broadcast later in the summer. Peter Powell loved the band and offered us a session on his hugely popular Radio 1 Drive Time show. And the record companies were impressed. The same record companies who had rejected demos of some of the same songs the band were performing (I still have the generic rejection letters ) before their metamorphosis into Spandau Ballet, tried to made friends with my mother on the phone in the hope she would accurately pass on their messages to me.

The last word on the Scala show should come from Bryan Morrison. He sat throughout the show with many of the record company guys. They stood out like sore thumbs and tried to take in the fact that all their stereotypes about a successful band and its audience were going out of the window. Not Bryan. A 60s music biz tycoon out of central casting complete with omnipresent cigar and market trader linguistics, he knew a good thing when he saw it. Any doubts raised by the assembled A&R men were brutally and loudly rebutted by him.
After the show, an employee of his, Mark Dean, later to become the man who signed and broke Wham!, came back and asked if Bryan could come back and have a word. I said yes, I liked Bryan. He was funny, smart and entertaining.

Between puffs on his cigar, he said “Steve…puff puff…I am like a virgin in love!” Before allowing the absurdity of this comment to sink in he followed up, “They are not going to be big…puff puff…they are going to be ENORMOUS!!!”

Well, we didn’t sign with him either, but he was right.

Unbeknown to us at the time we were about to join the jet set.

***

Steve Dagger - Spandau Ballet, Manager

13th May, 2020

(Photo credit: Graham Smith)